The Televisual Commercials 30
Jon Creamer introduces Televisual's exclusive annual report, the Commercials 30, and finds that while budgets are down and production companies are under threat from agency in-house units, commercials producers are finding new horizons beyond ads too.

Commercials 30: Best in Show
Commercials producers also get to vote for their favourite directors, stand out ads and top rated agencies along with their favourite post houses, editors and vfx ops. We reveal the results

Commercials 30: The Top 30
Televisual reveals the Commercials 30 itself, the 30 top rated commercials production companies in the UK

Music in Motion
So what’s next for the music behind the commercials? Will it be another year in the ascendant for London Grime perhaps? Portugese house? Afro beats or the Angolan kuduro sound?

Televisual Factual Festival report
Last month saw Televisual's annual Factual Festival return to Bafta. How to stand out in a world of ever increasing viewer choice was the big theme this time. Tim Dams reports

Alison Kirkham in interview
At the Televisual Factual Festival, the BBC's controller of factual Alison Kirkham outlined the shows the corporation is looking for in the year ahead

Reports& surveys

The choice of a good distribution partner is an important one for an independent production company. According to the Production 100, indies earned on average 13% of their revenues from exploiting their programme rights. The majority of the income, 10%, comes from overseas sales, while 3% comes from selling programmes to secondary UK broadcasters.

Distributors can also invest upfront in programming, helping indies to plug programme budget shortfalls. They are also a useful source of intelligence about commissioning, acquisition and programming trends at international broadcasters.

The superindie and studio-owned groups all have their own in-house sales operations (All3Media, Endemol, Shine, Zodiak, Fremantle, Warners, Sony, NBC, Twofour, Tinopolis, Red Arrow and Argonon), which often act as distributors for other producers.

That leaves most true independents with a choice of distributor, and many according to our poll, use the commercial arms of the key broadcasters, BBC Worldwide, ITV Global Entertainment and Sky Vision, as well as a range of independent distributors such as DRG, TCB, Cineflix, Off the Fence and TVF.

We asked indies taking part in the Production 100 to tell us which distributors they used for their international sales, and the ‘most used’ table (top right) ranks the outfits that received the most mentions. We also asked indies to reveal which indies they most rated (below right).

The box below charts some of the comments and feedback, much of it positive, we’ve had about individual distributors.
Indies don’t always provide fully upbeat comments about distributors though. “No-one stands out,” says one indie. Another adds: “We have found it difficult across the board to get the kind of distribution attention we feel our programmes merit and that we are promised by the initial acquisitions meetings. “I’m waiting to be impressed,” says another.